SBI Holdings is Sole Investor in Gauntlet’s $125 Million Series C to Push Institutional On-Chain Risk Management
Decentralized finance (DeFi) risk-modeling firm Gauntlet has secured a $125 million Series C financing round led exclusively by Japanese financial services conglomerate SBI Holdings.
The single-participant round, which finalized in June, marks the largest capital infusion for the New York-based startup since its inception in 2018. While Gauntlet's co-founder and CEO, Tarun Chitra, declined to disclose the current valuation, the transaction significantly outscales the firm’s $24 million Series B round in 2022, which valued the company at $1 billion under the lead of fintech specialist Ribbit Capital. San Francisco-based boutique investment bank FT Partners served as the exclusive strategic and financial advisor to Gauntlet for the transaction.
Shift to "Vault Curation" Infrastructure
The capital injection arrives amid a strategic pivot for Gauntlet. Originally founded as an analytics provider dedicated to stress-testing early-stage DeFi protocols and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), the firm has transitioned heavily toward vault curation.
- The Business Model: Gauntlet provides risk-optimized, non-custodial yield strategies across multiple blockchains.
- Data Scale: The company's automated platform currently monitors more than $42 billion in user assets, processing roughly 380 billion on-chain data points refreshed six times daily.
- Institutional Clientele: The company’s ongoing integrations have expanded to include mainstream asset managers and enterprise digital finance firms, notably Apollo, Coinbase, and Circle.
SBI's Expansionary Mandate
SBI Holdings continues to solidify its position as one of traditional finance's most active institutional allocators to digital asset infrastructure. The group's current crypto footprint spans structural stakes in Morpho, Ripple, and Circle, alongside domestic exchange infrastructure and tokenized Real World Asset (RWA) initiatives.
Executive commentary from both entities points toward a broader structural trend:
"With the backing of SBI... we now have the ideal environment to apply the fruits of the research and development we have cultivated over many years to the on-chain transition of institutional investors worldwide." — Tarun Chitra, Co-Founder & CEO of Gauntlet
"I really think this year SBI will increase our investment activities and even operational activities in the U.S., because of the clarity on regulation and pro-crypto, pro-innovation, pro-competition environment." — Kefei Lin, General Manager at SBI
The deployment comes despite a generally subdued retail digital asset environment, emphasizing a distinct divide as institutional market participants, including Citigroup and Morgan Stanley, proceed with tokenized deposit launches and system integrations.
Norbert Gehrke
